THE FILM VERDICT: Why tell this story in particular?
PETR VACLAV: A filmmaker’s motivation is always a bit mysterious; you need more than one reason. One of them was Josef Myslivecek’s life story. I also wanted to make a period film, because I’ve always been fascinated by the aesthetics of the 18th century. I also wanted to make a film in Italy, and a film about music. And since I live in France, I was also interested in how people go abroad for the sake of their art. Through Myslivecek’s story, I could combine all those elements.
TFV: At what point did you decide to have most of the film’s dialogue in Italian?
PV: From the beginning, it never made sense to me to make the film entirely in Czech, or even in English as some suggested, because the Italian context is an important part of the story. I mean, how would it sound with English or American actors playing Italian characters? I think we’re at a point in time where we should try to be as truthful and authentic as possible. I wonder if ten years from now it will even be possible to make a movie about a certain culture in another language. This is also why the film has three editors: two of them are my usual collaborators, who are based in France; and since none of us speak Italian that well, I decided I needed a native speaker to figure out the flow of all the dialogue scenes set in Italy.
TFV: Well, speaking as someone who grew up in Italy, I really enjoyed how everyone had the right dialect, depending on where the scene takes place.
PV: That was very important to me. I don’t have an ear for those nuances, so I instructed my casting director to find actors who were from those areas. I didn’t want people who could put on the accent, because that would still sound fake, in my experience. The one exception is Federica Vecchio, who is from Rome. She worked with a dialect coach to acquire a neutral accent, and within the film’s world you can imagine she was raised in a convent and learned the language there. For the scenes set in Naples, once the script was finished, I sent it to the actors so they could make revisions in terms of the dialect: some speak only Neapolitan, while others chose to do a mixture, because of the character they’re playing. This is also reflected in Myslivecek’s way of speaking: when he moves to Naples, he picks up some of the local terms.
TFV: Music is an important part of the film, as you’ve said. How did you work with the musicians?
PV: When I first started thinking about the project, I didn’t know how the music would sound, because the only recordings we had of Myslivecek’s operas were done in the 1970s and ‘80s in Czechoslovakia, and it was a disaster. Myslivecek’s music was tailor-made for the best performers of the time, and the singers on those recordings didn’t really have the skills required. I even thought at first that maybe he wasn’t such a great composer, after all. Then, when I met the conductor Vaclav Luks, founder of the baroque orchestra Collegium 1704, he reassured me that it is not Myslivecek’s fault. He explained why the bad interpretation can destroy this music so easily. So, we started researching it together, we went together to the archives in France and in Italy, we were discovering the music that nobody played since Myslivecek’s life time, and then in 2013 Luks conducted the opera Olimpiade, which I filmed it and made into a documentary film called Confessions of a Vanished, a portrait of Myslivecek. Thanks to this collaboration, we really started to understand how great that music is.
TFV: How complicated was it to make such an ambitious film during a pandemic?
PV: It was complicated in general. When I first started working on the script, I wanted to make the film with Italian producers, but they were not interested because I’m not well known and neither is the story, and they don’t even know how to pronounce Myslivecek’s name. I then tried to set it up in France, but that was not an option because of the Italian language, and I would have had to cast French actors. Then, in Cannes, I met a young Czech producer, Jan Macola, who suggested we work together, to do other films first, to improve our standing within the Czech film industry. We did it, and after three feature films we made together, the Czech Fund For Cinema decided to support us with a very important financial subvention (one million dollars). It allowed us to start production, to sign with Czech public television and to speak with Italian co-producers.
TFV: And what about the actual shoot?
PV: The pandemic was a concern because our schedule wasn’t very flexible with the actors’ availability. In the end, only one actress tested positive, and I had to get a double for the scene at the opera. I filmed her from a distance, so you shouldn’t be able to tell there was a switch.
(Interview conducted by Max Borg)
Note: an earlier version of this interview misidentified the actress who used a dialect coach. We apologize for the mistake. Additionally, two answers which were originally edited for length have been amended at Petr Vaclav’s request for context and clarity.
